


no moon

by brophigenia



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Star Wars Setting, Anal Sex, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Dirty Talk, Ghost Noah Czerny, Jedi Adam, Lust, M/M, No Spoilers, Non-Canonical Character Death, Rough Sex, Sith Lord Kavinsky, Sith Lord Ronan, Star Wars AU, Unrequited Love, and that means for both canons- star wars and trc, i saw the new star wars and had lots of feelings, sorta - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:53:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21930013
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brophigenia/pseuds/brophigenia
Summary: “Corax.” Kavinsky said, eyes bright with the fire of unholy light, of the power of the Dark Side.“DarthCorax.”He meant Ronan, kneeling in the center of the carnage he’d created, woken up to, his powered-down lightsaber’s hilt hot to the touch and telling in his hand.(AKA, Ronan is a Sith lord.)
Relationships: Joseph Kavinsky/Ronan Lynch, Richard Gansey III/Ronan Lynch, Ronan Lynch/Adam Parrish
Comments: 7
Kudos: 77





	no moon

**Author's Note:**

> So I went to see the new Star Wars movie, and NO SPOILERS but it was awesome. 
> 
> I came home and was like 'okay but what if Ronan was a Sith Lord?' because I wanted to write angsty space porn. 
> 
> Title from Star Wars, cut lyrics from Lil Peep.

_ i’m not evil by design  _

_ but i feel dead inside  _

***

“You killed them all.” Kavinsky said, or Darth Albtraum, whatever Ronan was supposed to call him now. Kavinsky said it so softly, said it like he was so goddamn _impressed._ Like he could come just from the words, musing on all the innocents Ronan mowed down in his fit of… his fit of _blackout_ _rage._ Rage and fury and wrath, all the things that the Jedi disdain. All the things he was not supposed to carry inside. 

All the things he was made of, full to the teeth. 

“Corax.” Kavinsky called him, eyes bright with the fire of unholy light, of the power of the Dark Side.  _ “Darth _ Corax.” 

Ronan, kneeling in the center of the carnage he’d created, woken to, his powered-down lightsaber’s hilt hot to the touch and telling in his hand. 

It was the purple-bladed weapon of a dead thing, now, for surely with all this death Ronan had killed himself, too. 

“Come on.” K said,  _ Darth Albtraum  _ says, and Ronan had been such a fool. “It’s time to go. Our master is calling.”  _ Our  _ master. 

“Ronan!” Maura screamed, the final Jedi elder left alive and cognizant, Calla dead by Ronan’s hand trying to protect the others and Persephone gone somewhere far away, out of her mind. “Ronan,  _ no!”  _

It was too late; it had been too late for years. 

Ronan rose, leaving his lightsaber in the blood and dirt. 

He followed Kavinsky. 

***

Gansey, Prince of Virginem, was both as beautiful and untouchable as he had been when he and Ronan were children, when Ronan was assigned to be his guard. To  _ protect _ him, while his mother did important work with the Galactic Senate. Sent as a courtesy by the Jedi Council, who knew a bit of their history and thought that he’d be  _ well-suited _ to the assignment. By his master, who had to have known what she was doing. 

It was  _ horrible. _ It was  _ bliss.  _ A child again, but a man, too, and not the  _ Jedi _ he was meant to be. Gansey was as golden as he ever was, and Ronan as shameful. 

He’d been prepared to do  _ anything  _ to save Gansey. 

And then  _ anything  _ had not seemed like enough; nothing had seemed  _ enough,  _ not with the nightly, horrifying,  _ prophetic _ dreams of Gansey’s death. Not with the knowledge that he was going to have to watch his oldest, best, most  _ beautiful  _ friend die— 

nothing could’ve been enough. 

Except for the whispers. The quiet whispers in the back of his mind that had been there for so long that they were  _ almost  _ a comfort, when they weren’t an endless source of torment. He’d wondered for so long if he was the only one who heard them, if he was just the weakest among his peers, the only one who couldn’t withstand their insidious  _ darkness,  _ and by the time he knew it was  _ only  _ him it was much,  _ much _ too late. 

Kavinsky had been beautiful to him, once— a horrible kind of beautiful, the kind that made him forgo his vows in the night to take himself in hand and jerk his cock raw thinking about. Something safer to fixate on than Gansey or Adam— Kavinsky was unapologetically  _ carnal,  _ in his low-cut robes and tight silk pants, lips red and eyes  _ dark.  _

And— he  _ saw  _ Ronan. Saw him as something more than a wrathful beast in a Jedi’s robes, playing dress-up. Saw him as a man, not a boy, not a sexless monk pretending at being a soldier. Curled those red lips at him and teased him in a low voice and just… 

_ wanted  _ him. Wasn’t shy about it. Wasn’t ashamed. 

Ronan wasn’t ashamed of wanting Kavinsky, not then— Kavinsky was not Gansey, or Adam. He could not be spoiled by Ronan’s touch. By his lust. He was not lily-white and pure as the snows on Hoth. 

(Later, this would make Ronan laugh desperately, remembering how right he was and how wrong, too. Better he have fucked Adam a thousand times right in the middle of a Council meeting than to have fucked Kavinsky  _ once  _ in his dark, silken bed.) 

He left Gansey for the Dark Side and now could only call Gansey his enemy, a Rebel, allied with the sparse few Jedi left in the galaxy still alive after Ronan—

after Ronan. 

Still, sometimes in the night he watched flickering holovids of Gansey, gleaming-eyed and compelling even in ghostly virtual silver hologram, and  _ wished.  _

(He wanted, just once, to open up the latest Resistance missive and hear Gansey saying  _ Ronan, we forgive you, please come home.  _ Hearing  _ Darth Corax  _ in Gansey’s fine voice was too much. A blaster shot to the heart, every time.) 

***

“Oh.” Kavinsky said, lightly, uncaring but somehow disappointed, too. Like Ronan was a dog who had made a mess in the living room. Unsurprised but dismayed, too. Ronan bared his teeth, crouched on the floor of the ‘fresher with his hair all around him like feathers, his scalp prickling raw in the unfamiliarly cool air. “You look like you’ve been plucked.”  _ Plucked.  _ Crouched in dark feathers, Ronan could not escape who he was now, with no other choice but to accept it. 

He was a killer. He was not a Jedi. He was  _ Corax,  _ and somehow this made him  _ K’s,  _ too. Albtraum’s new brother, in these ancient dark halls. The youngest acolyte of the Sith. Of Darth Mörder. A prince of the Dark Side, the way he’d once been the prince of Naboo, and then the prince of  _ nothing,  _ free under the Jedi’s command from his destiny to rule. 

“Kriff off.” Ronan hissed, but allowed K to haul him out of the floor, shoving him into the sonic shower with no small amount of violence as he bellowed for the cleaning droid to get the mess picked up. There was no privacy in this— no mercy. Ronan stood in the stall and kept eye contact with K, who leaned against the sink with his arms crossed over his chest as the droid vacuumed up Ronan’s shorn locks. 

Nudity around K no longer felt taboo, titillating, shameful— there were no secrets between them anymore. No mystery. He’d fallen prey to K’s honeytrap, and now could never climb back out of it. K was a disease beneath his skin, now. A thousand sonic showers could not bring him back out, again. 

Sensing his thoughts, K rolled his eyes. “Melodramatic.” He accused. The touch of his occlumency was so light-fingered that Ronan never knew when he was there and when he wasn’t. It was disturbing, violating, terrible. 

K was hard, beneath his robes, which were sheer everywhere they weren’t leather. He looked like a prostitute from Coruscant. He looked so good that Ronan’s back teeth hurt. He looked like the embodiment of all Ronan’s nightmares. 

“Would it make you feel better to fuck me?” K cooed, mocking, feeling Ronan’s wretched want as if it were his own. Maybe it was. Maybe they were bleeding into each other, here in this hellish place with only Kavinsky’s pack to keep them company. His Wolfsrudel, four Force users who had trained under K himself in the ways of death and torture. Marauders. They were usually all around Kavinsky like a guard, like a wall, like a second skin. 

Their touch was impersonable; they were a hive of heavy-handed, hard-bodied monsters who lived for K, to serve K, to keep him  _ entertained.  _

“No.” Ronan gritted, and shut off the sonic, dry and bare-skinned and too-hot the way he always was, on Mustafar. 

“Hmm…” K drew out his condescending hum of doubt. “Then you’d like  _ me _ to fuck  _ you? _ ” Sharpening, keen as a fox scenting blood, he leered. “Or maybe the Wolfsrudel?” He projected it into Ronan’s head, how he’d look belly-down and being ravaged by all four of them, Kavinsky watching, palming himself, as their leather-gloved hands  _ possessed  _ Ronan. Tore him to pieces. Made him thrash, and cry, and  _ come.  _

“By the Force—“ Ronan swore, and then Kavinsky was on him, knocking him to the floor, exploding stars in his eyes when the back of his head connected with the sonic’s floor. Kavinsky pried his thighs open, rutted clothed against where Ronan was naked, teething messily over his throat, his collarbones, his shamefully-peaked nipples. 

_ Let me in,  _ K said in his mind,  _ let me in let me in let me in in in.  _

“I’m trying.” Ronan gasped aloud, and sucked obligingly enough at K’s intrusive fingers as they shoved into his mouth, tasting blood when K’s knuckles scraped over his teeth. “I’m  _ trying.”  _

“Say it.” K said, both out loud and with his mind.  _ Say it.  _

“Just, just  _ fuck  _ me—“ Ronan cursed, thrashing, and opened his legs wider, trying to pull K in. Trying to stop the fingers and get to the  _ fucking.  _

_ “Say _ it.” 

“Kriff  _ off,  _ you bantha-fucking son of a-“ and  _ oh,  _ it hurt— K thrusting into his body and his mind all at once, bright pain in his head and dull pain in his ass, his thighs, everywhere he could’ve used more stretching, more lube, more  _ gentleness.  _ He didn’t want gentleness, though. That had no place here. He did not want to care for K. He wanted to loathe him, to loathe himself. 

_ Say it,  _ K howled in his head, and made it hurt. On purpose. He was too good at this to be sloppy, unless he  _ wanted  _ to. It felt like someone was shredding Ronan’s brain in a whirring, screaming blender.  _ Say it. SAY IT.  _

“Albtraum!” Ronan finally shouted, and beat on K’s skull, his shoulders, anywhere he could reach as the pain stopped and K started to  _ move.  _ “Albtraum, Albtraum,  _ Albtraum!”  _

K grinned, nasty and deranged and  _ awful.  _ “Good.  _ Good,  _ Corax.”  _ Come. Come, now.  _

Ronan wept, sick to his stomach and still aching in his head, and did. 

***

“Ronan, come  _ home.”  _ Blue said, her jaw set tight, gripping her mother’s lightsaber in one hand, ready to face him with the weapon of a more noble age. Ready to face him with the weapon of the Force, though she was about as Sensitive as the average handful of moonrock. Wielding weaponized Kyber crystals and malice, body small but hard with muscle. 

“This  _ is _ my home.” Ronan said, gesturing around himself at the fire and the lava and the hopelessness of Mustafar’s landscape. “Stop calling me that.”  _ Ronan.  _ It was bad enough still being  _ Ronan  _ inside his own head— he did not need to hear it from the outside, too. 

“Come  _ home.”  _ Blue repeated, eyes flashing. Determined. She powered on the lightsaber of her deified mother, held its hilt in both her small hands. She did not have the height of her mother, nor the raw power of the Force emanating from her minuscule frame. Her shoulders were as straight, though. As proud. 

Still the girl who had watched him and Adam train from the treetops, silent, hawkeyed. She’d grown with them, had spent secret hours practicing saber forms in the nights when nobody but Ronan was awake to see, to hear. 

They’d never spoken, those nights, except for his quiet commentary on her form, trying to help her without sparking off her hot-blooded temper or giving away too much of himself. 

“I destroyed it.” He responded. “I killed the Padawans. I killed Calla. I’ll kill you, too.” 

She winced when he mentioned Calla, her eyes going hard. It was a familiar look, by now. 

The first twisting strike of her borrowed saber against his sent a seismic pain through him, unbraced and unprepared for the blow. She put all her weight behind it, a trick she’d not learned from Calla, who had no use for such acrobatics. Calla had been tall and broad-shouldered and sturdy— she had no physical deficiencies to make up for. 

“If you won’t come home, then I won’t force you.” She grunted out as they exchanged blows, back and forth, gaining and losing land as they picked their way around the sizzling pools of lava. “But we all know the truth, Ronan. We  _ know.”  _

“You know  _ nothing.”  _ Ronan swore, and then tried to sweep her feet out from under her. 

“I know  _ you.”  _ She spat back, and stabbed him in the side. X-Wings dipped low, firing blaster shots from above onto the stronghold, trying to penetrate the shields with no luck. Ronan gasped in pain, striking out blindly, his cauterized wound on  _ fire.  _ He could smell it, his own seared flesh. 

“Like I said.” He snarled, and then was retreating, drawn back inexorably by his master’s voice in his head. Back to where K waited, sulking because he was not given the chance to murder the Resistance fighters, probably with a Bacta patch in one hand and a vibroknife in the other. 

***

“Hold still.” Jiang said, voice tinny and strange from beneath his helmet, though it was not equipped with a vocoder. Ronan had never seen him without it, but now stared down at Jiang’s bare hands as they applied a Bacta patch to his wound. 

“The girl did this?” Skov laughed,  _ scoffed,  _ in the corner, nudging Swan with his elbow. It was cruel, and rankling. “The Null?” 

“She could’ve killed you.” Prokopenko observed, lazily sprawled on a steel slab that was almost couch-shaped, looking for all the world as if he lay on fine silk cushions. 

“She  _ should’ve.”  _ K said then, baring his teeth, the only bare face in the room. “To teach you a frakking lesson about being  _ weak.”  _

Ronan winced, both from the word and the feeling of his skin starting to knit itself back together. Jiang wordlessly gave him an injection of anesthesia, though it was a little late for it. Still, Ronan liked the numbness better than the tingling sting. 

“Albtraum.” Swan said, almost-reprovingly, deep voice hollow-sounding through his own helmet. 

K swept from the room with a contemptuous glance at Ronan, his Wolfsrudel following in twos like clockwork, like wind-up toy soldiers, their capes and cloaks and skirts sweeping behind them to the time of their bootfalls. 

Ronan, left alone in the makeshift infirmary, closed his eyes and tried not to think about the look on Blue’s face when she wounded him. Surprised and sick and  _ scared  _ for him. He wondered if it was the first time she’d ever put her blade into living flesh. 

Somehow, for some reason, he hoped it  _ was.  _ Better that she learn from him than from someone less deserving, more innocent. Better that she learn to be cruel to people who deserved it. 

People like Ronan. 

***

“You killed them.” Adam said, very quietly. “You killed them, but you’re still  _ you.”  _ He said it like he was disappointed in himself. Like he was trying to convince himself otherwise. 

He held his powered-down lightsaber tight and he looked at Ronan like he loved him, but like hated himself for it. 

Self-loathing was Adam’s outlet— his center. The very core of Adam was this: cool dispassion born from his disdain for his own humanity. 

Ronan could glimpse the rage in the barest corners of Adam’s aura, though. Could see it flickering in his eyes sometimes, like they were Corellian rubies catching the light. 

He was beautiful to Ronan always, in a gut-wrenching way that had been a source of shame and fear when they were Padawans together, but never more than when he was  _ so close  _ to breaking open. To casting aside the mask that Ronan  _ knew  _ he was wearing, revealing his true face. His true nature. 

Ronan despised many things about his own desires, but none more than his all-consuming want to see Adam ruin everything he had worked for since he was a Youngling. To alienate himself from the Jedi in one fell swoop. To debase himself, and make Ronan feel like he was not alone. 

“I am not.” Ronan disagreed just as quietly, and flicked the switch to turn on his own lightsaber. The glow of it filled the air, staining Adam’s skin crismon. Like fresh blood. Like the strawberries they ate together in the summertime as children, plucking them off the vine while Master Calla gave them a break from their training. Like the warpaint Kavinsky had smeared onto his face before he left their base on Mustafar. “I am Corax.” 

Adam’s face set, gone smooth. All emotion erased. He truly was the best Jedi of their age. 

“Then we are enemies.” His lightsaber hummed as it powered on. They both coiled, ready, remembering Calla’s training. 

“We were always enemies.” Ronan returned.  _ “Always.”  _

***

“Tell me.” Kavinsky snarled in his ear, pinning Ronan down with his body weight and with the Force as he fucked into him, Ronan’s cheek grinding into the Durasteel floor below. They were both still in their battle wear, smelling of burnt flesh and terror and  _ death.  _

“Harder.” Ronan grunted back, not at all what K was wanting. It was a familiar script, but today Ronan was  _ absolutely  _ not in the mood. 

“No,” K said, sudden and serious. He stopped, though the Force still held him down and  _ open. _ “I want you to tell me.” 

“Just  _ fuck  _ me,  _ fuck!” I hate you I hate you I hate you,  _ he flung viciously at K through their bond. All Ronan wanted was to forget, to become just an animal wearing a man’s skin for a while, fucked into complacency. Fucked until that’s all he could think about— his hurts and his pleasure, knees knocking and heart pounding. 

“He promised,” K murmured, low and wretched in Ronan’s ear. “He said it would be easy. He said you would come around. You wouldn’t hate me. You would  _ want  _ it.” 

“I  _ want  _ it!” Ronan all-but-shouted, trying to stir his hips, to get some friction. To get  _ anything.  _

“Me.” K amended. “You would want  _ me.”  _

Ronan barked a laugh. “Never.” He swore, and closed his eyes while K put his back into it, sudden and vehement and punishing. K was further along his journey into the Dark Side than Ronan, true, but he was no paragon of restraint and virtue. He was too-easily taunted into  _ doing something.  _

In the aftermath they both lay still and panting in a graceless heap; Ronan felt no sentimentality for it, only a mild disgust. He did not want K touching him. He did not want to feel their mingled sweat and come drying on him,  _ in him.  _

“He promised you’d be mine.” K whispered, all low sorrow and anger. 

He.  _ Mörder.  _

“He lied.” Ronan replied flatly, and then dragged his way to his feet, leaving K to tremble on the floor. 

***

“I mean, can you really  _ not  _ leave?” Noah asked, perpetually-sixteen and eternally dressed in the robes of a Padawan. His braid hung down low, brushing against his collarbone. Ronan remembered the feeling of his own Padawan braid, long and perfectly-plaited and oiled with the only indulgence the Jedi allowed him. Sweet-smelling, like flowers on Naboo. 

He remembered the Padawans who had died, and how they used the same oil, too. How they’d all combed out their single long lock of hair each night and then redid them for each other, working the twists with oil until they shone, neat and tidy. 

The Padawans he’d killed. 

Ronan shuddered inside. 

“I don’t want to go back.” He replied, as flatly as he could manage. 

“You don’t have to lie to me.” Noah reminded him. “I’m dead.” 

As if Ronan could forget. 

“I killed you.” He reminded Noah. 

Noah smiled, just a little. So at peace. One with the Force. 

How Ronan envied him his death. His peace. His  _ goodness,  _ frozen in time. Noah died before he’d had to be tempted by the Dark Side. 

Still, Ronan cannot help but know that  _ Noah  _ would never have turned traitor, would never have plunged headlong into the Dark. 

Never been as weak as Ronan. 

“Maybe.” Noah shrugged, mysterious, blue-cast, almost impish. “Maybe not.” 

It was true, though. Noah’s name was one of the many that Ronan recited in his head at night, reminders of why he could never go home again.

_ Never.  _

***

Darth Mörder was not a man. 

Perhaps he had been, once— Ronan did not claim to know. He was not a man, but a  _ thing,  _ a robe covering a mass of buzzing, horrible  _ darkness.  _

“Master.” Kavinsky said, kneeling, gone blank in the face, gone wan and pale. He was afraid of Mörder— as he should’ve been. They were all afraid of Mörder, who had sacrificed his physical body to become one with the Dark Side of the Force. He was unkillable. Unbeatable. 

_ Nothing is unbeatable. Hope is never lost.  _ He could  _ hear _ his father’s voice saying in his ear, could practically see Niall on the edges of his vision, as strong and hearty as he’d been in life. His father had been a king. His father had been his  _ father,  _ and was dead, now, but never gone.

“Corax.” Mörder said in a creaking, echoing voice that made Ronan shudder, wondering how he had ever been  _ soothed  _ by its sound in his mind. “Come to me.” 

He could hear the battle happening in the atmosphere outside of this nightmarish stone prison; he could  _ feel  _ it, could feel Adam’s heart thundering in his chest and Gansey maneuvering his stupid, gorgeous orange ship recklessly through the air, Blue in the copilot’s seat, grim and determined. He’d been alone for so long with Mörder the Unmaker that Ronan felt almost uncomfortably full with them, the connection renewed. 

“Yes, master.” He murmured, and strode forward, uncomfortably aware of the black paint K had smeared on his face and how it had dried tight, threatening to flake if his expression changed. A reminder, but not the kind K thought he was administering. 

The Wolfsrudel were lurking at the edges of the room, wielding their bastardized lightsaber weapons and breathing steadily inside their armor, vulnerable skin tucked away from sight. Making them more like monsters than people. Jiang, Skov, Swan, Prokopenko. Waiting for K’s signal. 

“You are the one.” Mörder sighed. “You have always been the one.” He came closer to where Ronan stood, waiting, with K knelt at his side. “Do it, Ronan.  _ Do it.”  _ It was a horrible, strangled hissing sound, his given name coming from the waste of Mörder’s not-mouth.  _ Kill him,  _ Mörder said in his mind, providing him with the images of K’s demise, head severed and eyes staring out from a face frozen in fear. Images of Ronan battling the others, the Wolfsrudel all falling to the whirling berserker that was  _ Darth Corax,  _ come to fruition. 

Ronan drew his saber; he powered it on, red blade crackling like the air on Arkanis just before a thunderstorm. Something Ronan had never experienced, himself, but knew intimately from K’s mind, who had taken it from Swan’s. 

K was trembling, finely, close enough to feel the heat from Ronan’s blade. Seeing all of it, everything that Mörder intended. Ronan’s rise to power.  _ There are always two.  _ Ronan’s coup, staged by their master. 

K had been a puppet. He had been used. 

“Yes, master.” Ronan said, and raised his lightsaber. 

***

“Ronan, wait for me!” Gansey bellowed, grinning and golden beneath the Virgenem sky, loping in the grass behind Ronan, gaining quickly on him with powerful strides of his lean legs. 

“We shouldn’t.” Adam breathed, but his hands came up to cup Ronan’s neck, to scratch at where his hair was  _ just  _ long enough to begin to curl again, tracing oh-so-delicately over the shell of Ronan’s ear, the start of his Padawan braid. Ronan did not care about  _ shouldn’t,  _ not right now, pressed together and smelling like ozone, like battle, like exhilarating adrenaline. He pressed their mouths together and felt bliss. 

“Again.” Blue demanded, panting with the exertion, clutching her practice staff tight, murder in her eyes. Favoring her left shoulder and trying to compensate for it. Heedless of how sore she’d be in the morning. Ronan jumped into the air on her command and brought his staff down against hers with all his not-inconsiderable strength. Blue twisted, pivoted, the way Calla had shown he and Adam earlier, and  _ finally  _ threw Ronan hard onto his back. She put the butt of her staff to his throat. She was grinning, and so was he. “Surrender or die.” 

“It’s okay.” Noah shushed him, quietly, hand coming up to cup Ronan’s face, even with Ronan’s saber in his chest. “It’s okay, Ronan. It’s  _ okay _ .  _ Wake up.  _ Wake—” __

***

“—up, Force  _ damn  _ you, Ronan—“ Adam demanded, slapping at his cheeks. Ronan let out a low, stringy groan, trying to raise his hand to swat at Adam’s but blinking in surprise when he couldn’t. His wrist was singed. His hand was… not there. 

“Ow.” Ronan croaked, instead, and winced when it made his throat ache like he’d swallowed a handful of Bantha horn shards. 

“You’re so stupid. You’re so—“ Adam cut himself off furiously, and then dragged Ronan upright, though his left leg felt broken and all his ribs  _ ached.  _

“What about—“ Ronan slurred, blinking hard, everything in his blurred vision light and dark at once. “What—“ 

“Come  _ on!”  _ Adam shouted, and fairly carried Ronan out of the rumbling, quaking old Sith temple that threatened to fall around their heads at any given moment. 

Ronan drifted in and out, stumbling when he could, sick and clammy with how badly everything  _ hurt.  _ When he saw light overhead he thought that the sun had risen, though he realized in short order that he was flat on his back on the floor of a ship, familiar in its classic design and the orange paint lining each panel on its interior.  _ Gansey’s  _ ship. 

“Oh.” He whispered, and wished he’d died rather than to come here, broken and  _ stained,  _ to see all of the things he had given up forever. 

“You’re going to be fine.” Blue told him, at his head, moving his injured limbs to her liking, tone brisk but with an underlying hysteria. Her hands shook as she lifted his arm, the one without its hand attached. Her fingers trembled as they traced just above his stump. It hurt. Everything hurt. 

“I can’t—“ Ronan tried to say, and tried to rise up, when he felt the telltale rumblings of takeoff begin. “I  _ can’t—“ _

“You  _ can.”  _ Blue whispered, low and fierce. Ronan could hear Gansey and Adam in the cockpit, hear them working so seamlessly to get the Pig into the air. “Ronan, we aren’t letting you go again.” 

He swallowed, strength gone, and slumped back down, head now laid in her lap. They had never touched like this before, except to train, to grapple, to spar. It felt surprisingly natural; Ronan hadn’t been touched so gently in such a long time that it hurt almost as terribly as his wounds, wounds that Blue was packing with Bacta and layering bandages on, aided by the whirring medical droid that had always administered to Gansey’s skinned knees and split lips when they were children. 

“Hold still, Master Ronan,” NUR-5E instructed in its gentle, measured voice. It brought him back to his youth so fast his head spun. 

“Okay.” Ronan finally conceded, too exhausted to protest further. “Okay.” 

***

_ many men have tried to save me _

_ but all they do is try _

**Author's Note:**

> follow me on twitter @ brophigenia  
> follow me on tumblr @ brophigenia.tumblr.com


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